QuarkXPress 7: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Job Tickets and Job Jackets
In the old days before desk­top pub­lish­ing, the term “style sheet” referred to all type­faces, col­ors, and oth­er styl­is­tic choic­es required by a project. Multiple jobs for one client or project were pro­duced from the same style sheet to ensure con­sis­tent style. A job tick­et was the project specs–do this, in this for­mat, out­put to this proof, out­put to this sub­strate, and so on. Job tick­ets includ­ed dead­lines, client con­tact infor­ma­tion, where assets could be found, and a track­ing system–usually sig­na­tures of who did what on the job.

Since the advent of soft­ware like XPress, many terms have been rede­fined. “Style sheet” has come to mean mere­ly the def­i­n­i­tion of text style, and “job tick­et” now means what style sheet used to.

XPress 7 includes reusable, sharable job tick­ets that, sim­i­lar to XPress doc­u­ment tem­plates, con­tain all the style sheets, col­ors, H&Js, out­put setups, and oth­er def­i­n­i­tions of a project’s style and func­tion. Job tick­ets can be cre­at­ed and passed out to clients for approval. Even bet­ter, they can be cre­at­ed in-house, then e‑mailed to ven­dors who work with your brand, ensur­ing con­sis­ten­cy with­out hav­ing to fax over a print­ed list of the type­faces, sizes, and sig­na­ture col­ors for your organization’s doc­u­ments. Any lay­out in XPress–print or Web–can be assigned a job tick­et, option­al­ly over­writ­ing any con­flict­ing or altered styles or col­ors. They’re like Append, auto­mat­ed. Best yet, should style def­i­n­i­tions change, using a job tick­et instant­ly brings projects and lay­outs back into com­pli­ance with revi­sions. This is a big plus for any pro­duc­tion man­ag­er or cre­ative director.

More com­plex projects may have sev­er­al dif­fer­ent but relat­ed specs. For instance, one tick­et that han­dles print­ed doc­u­ments may spec­i­fy PMS col­ors, the use of custom-built, cor­po­rate fonts, and an out­put style to a par­tic­u­lar ICC pro­file. The same client may also employ a sec­ond, sep­a­rate job tick­et for Websites and enewslet­ters, using closest-match Web-safe col­ors and a selec­tion of Web-safe fonts. Those mul­ti­ple job tick­ets can be assem­bled into a job jack­et, which func­tions sort of like a super job ticket–one file, with mul­ti­ple def­i­n­i­tions (job tick­ets) with­in. Creatives sim­ply attach to their lay­outs the right tick­ets from the jacket.

Being per­haps the world’s biggest fan of any­thing that infus­es automa­tion, effi­cien­cy, and con­sis­ten­cy into the cre­ative work­flow with­out sac­ri­fic­ing cre­ative free­dom, I absolute­ly adore XPress’s job tick­et­ing and jack­et­ing imple­men­ta­tion. Short of the week­ly church bul­letin, I can’t think of a sin­gle pub­lish­ing work­flow that wouldn’t ben­e­fit from job tick­ets and jack­ets today… Come to think of it, you should be using for your church bul­letin, too.

Composition Zones
One document:one user. Big pub­lish­ing solu­tions broke the 1:1 ratio long ago, but it has per­sist­ed as the rule in sub-$5,000 desk­top soft­ware. Recognizing the need for col­lab­o­ra­tion in medi­um and even small pub­lish­ing, both Adobe and Quark have pur­sued ways to tran­si­tion into a one-to-many, one document:many design­ers work­flow. Editorial pro­grams like Quark’s QuarkCopyDesk and Adobe’s InCopy opened the door halfway, allow­ing many edi­tors to write copy into one design lay­out, but the one designer:one doc­u­ment bar­ri­er remained.

XPress 7 breaks down that bar­ri­er with com­po­si­tion zones. Similar to edi­to­r­i­al solu­tions, lay­out design­ers appor­tion sec­tions of a page for use by some­one else on a dif­fer­ent com­put­er. These com­po­si­tion zones are saved as sep­a­rate doc­u­ments oth­er users open and edit. Designer A works on the rest of the lay­out, leav­ing the zone as a hole. Simultaneously, Designer B works only that hole, with­out even see­ing the rest of the layout.

Creating com­po­si­tion zones is sim­ple: With the new Composition Zone tool, drag a rec­tan­gle to define the com­po­si­tion area, then define its shar­ing options on the new Shared Content palette. Zones can be named for easy ref­er­ence, and option­al­ly shown as addi­tion­al layout-like tabs at the bot­tom of the project win­dow. They can also be defined as inter­nal, which retains the 1:1, document:designer, ratio, or saved to an exter­nal .QXP project file, allow­ing one design­er to work in the orig­i­nal lay­out while anoth­er works on the com­po­si­tion zone. In a stroke of genius, com­po­si­tion zones can be made avail­able to not only the cur­rent project, but to mul­ti­ple projects–reusable designs or lay­out seg­ments that can be designed once and incor­po­rat­ed into any num­ber of lay­outs. It’s this fea­ture that makes com­po­si­tion zones valu­able to the single-person work­flow. By mak­ing the shared zone avail­able to mul­ti­ple projects, chang­ing the design once updates all projects and lay­outs using it. Put sim­ply, it’s like link­ing to the same image in mul­ti­ple lay­outs; but that image can be one or more pic­ture box­es, text box­es, rules, stars–any­thing that can be placed or drawn in an XPress layout.

From with­in the new Collaboration Setup dia­log the fre­quen­cy and type of shared con­tent updates can be spec­i­fied (as can job tick­et and jack­et link­ing). Shared con­tent may be set to only update at open­ing (like linked images), before out­put (like linked images), or even at inter­vals while you work. Automatic updates take a lit­tle get­ting used to; while typ­ing a pho­to cap­tion on a most­ly emp­ty page it can be jar­ring when the entire page sud­den­ly fills with text and imagery.

Did I men­tion you can also share an entire multi-page lay­out with any num­ber of projects, just like a com­po­si­tion zone?

Composition zones and shared lay­outs are fan­tas­tic, but, of course, there’s room for improvement.

Specifically, it would be nice if Designer B had the option of see­ing the entire lay­out, even if it’s locked to him. Designing ads on a peri­od­i­cal page, of course, is bet­ter han­dled double-blind, but not so in most oth­er instances. Rarely do dif­fer­ent sec­tions of the same page exist autonomous from one anoth­er; there is usu­al­ly some coher­ence between the work of dif­fer­ent design­ers on the same page. I would also like to see shared con­tent dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed from full projects on disk some­how. Saving a zone as an exter­nal file cre­ates a .QXP project file, which, when look­ing at a fold­er full of XPress project files, looks like a full lay­out. Inevitably, some­one will get con­fused and over­write or delete a com­po­si­tion zone or the full lay­out file with the oth­er. If XPress gave exter­nal shared con­tent a dif­fer­ent file type and exten­sion, or even sug­gest­ed a nam­ing con­ven­tion like “shared, page 2, of issue 9 project…”, it would help alle­vi­ate the con­fu­sion. Currently, XPress just offers the default file­name of “Layout 2”, “Layout 3,” and so on, just like the Save dialog.

Compared to what shared con­tent is and can be, these are extra­or­di­nar­i­ly minor com­plaints, and they should in no way detract from the fact that com­po­si­tion zones and shared lay­outs are the future of col­lab­o­ra­tive cre­ative pub­lish­ing. XPress 7 paves the way into that future almost flaw­less­ly. Bravo!

Split Windows
Zoom in to tweak a detail, zoom out to see the effect on the whole object, zoom back in for more tweak­ing. It’s a famil­iar dance to any­one who works on com­plex or visually-rich designs. Take a load off: the dance has final­ly ended.

XPress 7 now sup­ports mul­ti­ple views of a sin­gle project–including all of its layouts–although it works a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly than you may be used to in oth­er appli­ca­tions. Rather than spawn­ing a com­plete­ly new copy of the doc­u­ment win­dow, which can then be resized and repo­si­tioned autonomous­ly, XPress splits the cur­rent doc­u­ment win­dow either hor­i­zon­tal­ly or ver­ti­cal­ly. And, you can keep on splitting.

Wait, it gets better.

Each window/view has its own inde­pen­dent view set­tings. Sure, you can zoom in on the details in one win­dow while watch­ing the whole page in anoth­er win­dow, but you can also have a third show­ing the in-RIP sep­a­ra­tions, a fourth with a grayscale proof, and yet anoth­er show­ing process and spot colors.

Proof Output
Combined with split win­dows, XPress 7’s new proof out­put views are a pre-pressman’s dream. After con­fig­ur­ing the new col­or man­age­ment engine in XPress’s Color Setups > Source, lay­outs can be soft proofed live onscreen in any of sev­en modes: grayscale, com­pos­ite RGB, com­pos­ite CMYK, com­pos­ite CMYK and spot, con­vert to process, process and spot, and in-RIP separations.

And those are just the defaults! New out­put setups can be cre­at­ed (from scratch or by edit­ing a dupli­cate of one of the defaults) with a stan­dard, ICC profile-based col­or man­age­ment inter­face. Moreover, setups are shareable.

The Not So Little Little Stuff
Get Picture and Get Text are no more. Now they’re the more log­i­cal­ly titled Import Picture and Import Text, respec­tive­ly. The key­board short­cut of CMD+E/CTRL+E remains, though.

Those fool­ish lay­er indi­ca­tor icons are gone, thank­ful­ly. Color cod­ing lay­ers is noth­ing new, but until XPress 7, box­es on any lay­er but the default includ­ed an awk­ward and often in the way lay­er icon in its top right cor­ner. XPress 7 took a cue from oth­er layer-enabled appli­ca­tions and dropped the icon. Now the col­or of object bound­ing box­es match­es the col­or assigned to the layer–a vast­ly improved method.

Lock Story is a very handy lit­tle option for just about any­one who works with text. It does exact­ly what it sounds like: It locks out copy changes to the con­tent of a text box. It even blocks Find/Change oper­a­tions; copy can still be found and high­light­ed by Find/Change, it just can’t be changed.

Live, high-resolution image pre­views. ‘Nuff said.

When sav­ing a page as an EPS fonts can final­ly be embed­ded, which sud­den­ly makes XPress-exported EPS usable out­side of XPress.

When text over­sets, XPress 7 can auto­mat­i­cal­ly flow it onto to new pages. While it will only save your butt on the rare doc­u­ment with­out a fixed page count, it has a less obvi­ous ben­e­fit: Scrolling through a lay­out look­ing for that lit­tle red over­set text indi­ca­tor is tedious and error-prone, but how like­ly are you to miss whole pages?

In ver­sions past, replac­ing images in a pic­ture box caused all pre­vi­ous­ly applied attrib­ut­es and trans­for­ma­tions to dis­ap­pear. For exam­ple, maybe you import­ed a low-resolution FPO and rotat­ed it 45-degrees. Upon import­ing the actu­al image, replac­ing the FPO, the rota­tion would reset, as would any oth­er trans­for­ma­tions you may have applied. In the XPress 7 import pic­ture dia­log, how­ev­er, is the Maintain Picture Attributes box, which, wise­ly, is checked by default. Replacing exist­ing images retains all attrib­ut­es applied to the box–scaling, rota­tion, even posi­tion­ing. If you depend on XPress for image-heavy doc­u­ments like cat­a­log or mem­ber direc­to­ry work, this a not so lit­tle lit­tle thing should have you jump­ing up and down right now.

Drag N’ Drop from the Desktop. On Windows (sor­ry Mac users), both image and text files may be dragged from the Desktop or an Explorer win­dow and dropped into pre-drawn box­es in the XPress lay­out. This works for every file type XPress can import via Import Text or Import Picture, and it’s a whole lot faster.

Group Effects: To set fill, frame, or trans­paren­cy options on mul­ti­ple box­es at once, group them. When two or more box­es are grouped, either the Measurements palette or the Colors palette can be used to affect the attrib­ut­es of all grouped boxes.

Picture Effects (a.ka. QuarkVista) now works on the raster con­tent of EPS files as well as TIFFs. Changes made to a syn­chro­nized pic­ture box will apply to all the oth­er syn­chro­nized pic­ture boxes–a very handy time-saver.

The Print dia­log has been reor­ga­nized into a more log­i­cal, eas­i­er to use lay­out. On its Transparency pane are two sim­ple options: A tog­gle to ignore trans­paren­cy flat­ten­ing and send any trans­par­ent areas through unflat­tened (and thus, main­tain­ing their trans­paren­cy), and a drop­down list to deter­mine the res­o­lu­tion at which flat­tened areas of trans­paren­cy will be ras­ter­ized. My only com­plaint with this is that, with trans­paren­cy so new to XPress users, the func­tion of these options is not imme­di­ate­ly appar­ent. Before XPress 7 releas­es, I hope Quark uses the copi­ous neg­a­tive space on this pane to offer unini­ti­at­ed users a def­i­n­i­tion of flat­ten­ing as well as tips for achiev­ing opti­mal results in com­mon out­put scenarios.

Output styles can be saved for var­i­ous media, includ­ing out­putting to print, PDF, EPS, and PPML.

PDF/X‑1a and PDF/X‑3 stan­dards are sup­port­ed for out­put, and XPress 7 will even check your doc­u­ment as you work for objects and attrib­ut­es not PDF/X‑compliant.

Palette arrange­ments, includ­ing size, posi­tion, and whether the tabs show atop the Measurements palette, can be saved as palette sets. Those sets can even be giv­en key­board short­cuts for rapid switching.

The con­ve­nience of set­ting tabs from the Measurements palette is some­thing you sim­ply can’t appre­ci­ate until you do it.

Enhancements to tables include: split­ting tables across mul­ti­ple pages, with repeat­ing head­ers and foot­ers, odd/even row and col­umn select­ing for rapid for­mat­ting, dynam­ic cell resiz­ing as you type, and auto-fit tables to import­ed data.

Next: The Bad of QuarkXPress 7